maintained against valued authority. All quotations from Country Girl experiences are made with direct personal permission of the writers; the kindness of the girls, who for the sake of other girls have given these permissions, is here mentioned with special appreciation.

For illustrations the author is indebted to the Home Economics and other Departments of the Agricultural College at Cornell University and to the Home Economics Department of the School of Agriculture at Alfred, N. Y.; also to Mr. S. H. Dadisman of the Agricultural College at Ames, Iowa; to Mr. O. H. Benson of the United States Department of Agriculture; to Mr. A. A. Allen of the Cayuga Bird Club, and to Mr. James M. Pierce of the Iowa Homestead of Des Moines, Iowa. The list should also include Mr. R. M. Rosbrugh of Syracuse, N. Y., and Mrs. Mabel Stuart Lewis, efficient homesteader, of Fladmoe, South Dakota. Other names are mentioned in the text and need not be repeated here. To these and other helpers, great thanks are due.

This book has been written about the Country Girl and for the Country Girl; for her mother and father, and for everybody else as well; but especially for the Country Girl herself. It will reach its aim if some father says, "Why, here now, somebody has written a book about my little gal there. I should not have thought it was worth while to make a book about her. Well, now, perhaps she is of some account. Guess I'll give her a little more schooling; guess I'll let her go to that institute she was asking to go to; guess I'll let her have some music lessons, or buy her a piano, or send her to college." Or if some mother says wistfully, "My daughter is going to have a better chance than I had!" Or if the Country Girl herself should say, "I see my opportunity and I will arise and fulfil my mission."

The book will reach its aim, too, if another thing should happen. This is the first book about the Country Girl. There have been tons of paper devoted to the farmer; reams filled on the farm woman; not a line for the girl. May this first book be followed by many, correcting its misconceptions, rectifying its mistakes, directing its enthusiasms into the best channels for the welfare of the six and three-quarters millions of Country Girls of this land! By that time there will be seven millions—unless in fact these six millions shall have run away to build their homes and rear their children in the hot, stuffy, unsocialized atmosphere of the town, leaving the happy gardens without the joyous voices of children, the fields without sturdy boys to work them, the farm homes without capable young women to—shall I say, to man them? No, let us say to woman them, to lady them, to mother them, and so to make them centers of wholesome interesting life that, if the girls do their part, shall be the very heart and fiber of the nation.

The author is sorry that she cannot write to all the Country Girls who have written her either through the questionnaire or through other means of communication in the groups with which she has been so happily associated; but she wishes that every Country Girl who reads this book would write to her (using the address below) and tell her where she thinks the book has spoken truly and where mistakenly. She trusts the judgment of the Country Girls of America absolutely, if they can but be induced to speak in unison and after careful thought.

Martha Foote Crow.
Tuckahoe, New York City
August, 1915.

CHAPTER I

THE COUNTRY GIRL—WHERE IS SHE?

Frances E. Willard.


O Woman, what is the thing you do, and what is the thing you cry?
Is your house not warm and enclosed from harm, that you thrust the curtain by?
And have we not toiled to build for you a peace from the winds outside,
That you seek to know how the battles go and ride where the fighters ride?

You have taken my spindle away from me, you have taken away my loom;
You bid me sit in the dust of it, at peace without cloth or broom;
You have shut me still with a sleepy will, with nor evil nor good to do,
While our house the World that we keep for God should be garnished and swept anew.

The evil things that have waxed and grown while I sat with my white hands still,
They have meshed our world till they twined and curled through my verywindow sill;
Shall I sit and smile at my ease the while that my house is wrongly kept?
It is mine to see that the house of me is straightened and cleansed and swept!

Margaret Widdemer.

CHAPTER I

THE COUNTRY GIRL—WHERE IS SHE?

The clarion of the country life movement has by this time been blown with such loudness and insistence that no hearing ear in our land can have escaped its announcement. The distant echoes of brutal warfare have not drowned it: above all possible rude and cruel sounds this peaceful piping still makes itself heard.

It has reached the ears of the farmer and has stirred his mind and heart to look his problems in the face, to realize their gigantic implications, and to shoulder the responsibility of their solution. It has penetrated to the thoughts of teachers and educators everywhere and awakened them to the necessities of the minute, so that they have declared that the countryside must have educational schemes adapted to the needs of the countryside people, and that they must have teachers whose heads are not in the clouds. It has aroused easy-going preachers in the midst of their comfortable dreams and has caused here and there one among them to bestir himself and to make hitherto unheard-of claims as to what the church might do—if it would—for the betterment of country life.

And all of these have given hints to philanthropists and reformers, and these to organizations and societies; these again have suggested theories and projects to legislators, senators, and presidents; the snowball has been rolled larger and larger; commissions have sat, investigations have been made, documents have been attested, reports handed in, bills drafted and, what is better, passed by courageous legislation; so that now great schemes are being not only dreamed of but put into actual fulfilment. Moreover, lecturers have talked and writers have issued bulletins and books, until there has accumulated a library of vast proportions on the many phases of duty, activity, and outlook that may be included under the title, "A Country Life Movement."

In all this stirring field of new interest, the farmer and his business hold the center of attention. Beside him, however, stands a dim little figure hitherto kept much in the background, the farmer's wife, who at last seems to be on the point of finding a voice also; for a chapter is now assigned to her in every book on rural conditions and a little corner under a scroll work design is given to her tatting and her chickens in the weekly farm paper. Cuddled about her are the children, and they, the little farm boys and girls, have now a book that has been written just about them alone—their psychology and their needs. Also, the tall strong youth, her grown-up son, has his own